Sandy’s Forgotten

The Baruch Houses, the largest housing project in Manhattan, take up about twenty-seven acres of the island. They’re a few blocks east of the trendy part of the Lower East Side, a little north of the point where Manhattan stops running straight down and starts curving toward Wall Street and the Battery. More than five thousand people live there—and, days after the storm, they are still living in the dark. They’re mostly poor; according to the 2010 American Community Survey, the estimated median income in the area was $17,828—$4,222 below the 2010 poverty line for a family of four, and $32,457 less than the estimated median income in New York City as a whole. Walk about five blocks west from Baruch Houses and the median income jumps almost fifty thousand dollars. It is disturbingly easy to lose track of the people who live there amid all the gentrification in New York these days.

The people who live at the Baruch Houses were supposed to have evacuated before Sandy hit. Some did. Many did not, though, often because they had no good place to go. They are still there, without power, water, or any visible help from any government agency—city, state, or federal—other than some people from the city Housing Authority who’d come by to pump water out of flooded basements. Everywhere you walk in the neighborhood, fire hydrants have been turned into makeshift wells, with lines of people waiting, bottles and jugs in hand.

“It’s a twenty-four-hour operation,” Carmen Perez joked, pointing to the people standing at one of the hydrants. Perez, who said she’d opted not to evacuate because she lives with her parents, who are ill, was meeting a friend who’d driven in from Brooklyn to bring her bottled water and food.

One resident, Nino, who said he works as a doorman nearby, had heard a rumor that the National Guard was coming with water, food, and supplies. We walked together through the complex for a couple of blocks, to where they were supposed to be. Along the way, he showed me a large uprooted tree that had fallen along the path where he would have been walking to work during the storm, which his boss had asked him to do—Nino had, luckily, refused. Just beyond that was the spot where he’d heard the National Guard would be setting up. No one was there. (National Guard troops have been helping rescue those stranded in Hoboken, across the Hudson; others were working at Bellevue Hospital, keeping generators fuelled and then assisting with the evacuation of patients.)

Others were relying on the food they had left. Two neighbors, Hector Agosto and Eddie Gonzalez, had walked down from their apartments on the seventh floor to get water at one hydrant. Both planned to stick it out until the power came back—Agosto because the relatives he’d otherwise go to, out on Long Island, also didn’t have power, and Gonzalez because, he said, he had “nowhere to go, really.” They’d been able to take a bus to Chinatown, which doesn’t have power either, to do a little shopping, and they said—as did another friend who joined them—that they’d been able to put the food from their refrigerators and freezers on ice. “Gas is still on, chicken’s in the oven right now,” Agosto said. He estimated that he had “at least another day before it gets bad.” It was Wednesday then, and Con Ed says the power isn’t coming back until Friday or Saturday.

Downtown, hundreds of thousands of people remain without power. Many of them—usually those who live in buildings that stand six stories or higher, and there are plenty of those—are without running water as well. Public transportation remains limited. The subway is not running below Thirty-fourth Street, and on Wednesday night the M.T.A. temporarily suspended all bus service below Twenty-third Street; given their explanation of that decision, it seems likely that service will be suspended at night for as long as downtown remains dark. There are still very few ways for the people who live down there to get information about their situation—there is little or no cell phone service, and, of course, there is no television without electricity, though there are pay phones and some people, presumably, have battery-powered radios, though who knows how long those will last—so some are still wandering the streets inquiring of anyone who might know something. And it’s getting cold; temperatures dipped into the low forties overnight, and they’re not supposed to top the low fifties today.

The people I saw around the Baruch Houses seemed upbeat, an attitude noted by Reverend Leo Lawrence, who works at the nearby Dewitt Reformed Church. “It seems to me that it’s the first time I’ve seen so much coöperation between people, stores, everything,” he said. “It’s much more neighborly.” He thought most would try to wait the situation out. Asked why he hadn’t evacuated, he seemed surprised at the question. “Where would I go?” he asked.

But the people on the street could afford to be more optimistic than some others—they, after all, could get up and down their stairs. Another man, seeing me interviewing Lawrence, notebook and pen in hand, stopped me and called over the woman he was with, Migdalia Merced, to help translate his sometimes poor English. He wanted help, and assumed I could provide it—he didn’t seem to understand that I was there as a reporter, not with the government, though Merced tried to explain it to him. They needed new food stamps, he said. They’d had two hundred dollars’ worth, but had used them to buy food before the storm, and the food was “damaged” now. And they were caring for the woman whose apartment they lived in. “She cannot walk, she’s in a wheelchair,” he said. “She’s stuck.” They were getting her food and water, but couldn’t afford to do so. The woman had tried calling 311 for help, he said, but the operator, “she’s not helpful to the lady. She’s still waiting.”

Elsewhere, partial subway service is back. On late Wednesday afternoon, the banner headline on the Times’ Web site read, “City Copes With Gridlocked Traffic.” Restaurants, stores, and offices are open. Manhattan is getting back to normal—at least, the parts most people notice.